Mark Lombardi (1951-2000): Global Networks at The Drawing Center
By Adam Mendelsohn
Five weeks after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, an F.B.I agent contacted the Whitney Museum of American Art to obtain a copy of Mark Lombardi’s drawing, BCCI-ICI & FAB 1972 -91 (4th Version) (1996-2000). The agent was interested in the work to gain insight into Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network. Lombardi’s remarkable drawing, spanning some 11 feet in width, depicts the story of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), whose principals stole an estimated $12 billion dollars. According to Time magazine, it was the largest criminal enterprise in history.
Lombardi called his large-scale graphite drawings Narrative Structures. Using an adjustable splein or ship’s ark, Lombardi plotted the contractual relationships between the most powerful people in the world; presidents, mob bosses, dictators, terrorists, bankers, heads of state, CEOs, moguls, and even the Pope. Lombardi stated: "I call them Narrative Structures because each [drawing] consists of a network of lines and notations which are meant to convey a story… typically about a recent event that interests me."
Reading the drawings for the first time is an intoxicating experience. The fluid arcs and delicate compositions draw you near and as you approach, what began as some kind of astrological antiquity transforms into a complicated narrative where the notations, lines, and discs articulate real-life tales of corruption at the highest level. It isn’t easy to make sense of the drawings, even with a rudimentary understanding of the moments in history they surround. That doesn’t, however, interfere with the highly seductive quality they possess. It’s something to do with a compelling balance between objectivity and lyricism.
I find myself using the discs marked with red notations as entry points into the larger hive of whirling transactions. Those are the points which signify the restraint of illegal activity, any lawsuits, bankruptcy, criminal indictments, murder, death or legal actions taken against named participants. Like dead cells, they have lost their ability for symbiotic relationships. As I trace my way from the point of arrested development and into the nucleus of the drawing, I discover I have been schooled in modern power politics. The path doesn’t lead to any one meta-power. As writer Tan Lin noted in her article for Art in America, "Despite the circular format of these drawings, there is no central, unifying structural nexus or identifiable figure who might be seen as directing the various events. Instead, a diffuse constellation of power relations spans various time frames and continents." In other words, if you cut the head off in one place, it grows back in another.
Lombardi was known to be familiar with the theories developed by Deleuze and Guattari, who used rhizomes as a model for human interaction and capitalism. According to Robert Hobbs, curator of Global Networks, Lombardi was also struck by a press photograph showing J.F.K drawing flow charts on a blackboard to demonstrate teamster corruption. Mr. Hobbs goes on to suggest that the basic form of Lombardi’s drawings might have come from a document that was discovered during the Iran Contra debacle. In Feb. 1987, a crudely rendered, elaborate flow chart was found in Oliver North’s safe. The drawing graphically depicted a network of 23 offshore shell corporations and non-profit organizations that North had organized under the name Project Democracy. If Lombardi’s drawings sometimes look like airline flight charts, it’s not without irony to note that flight capital is a term used to describe the distribution of money between off-shore shell accounts. Otherwise known as money laundering, it is an activity Lombardi documents in his drawings. With a disregard for national and corporate barriers, the drawings show us vast sums of money bouncing around time and space like a steel marble in a pinball machine.
Lombardi acknowledged history painting as precedence for his art. Known as Grand Machines during the 19th century, history paintings sought to heroically represent important events. Coupling academic and artistic endeavor, one of its failings was perhaps that it privileged effect over accuracy, which I find not to be the case in Lombardi’s work. In more recent times, Lombardi’s investigative practice can be associated with Hans Haake and Gordon Matta-Clark’s earlier work involving NYC real estate scandals. In terms of scope and ambition, Lombardi’s work is possibly most comparable to Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s flow chart about Modernism. Barr Jr., the founding director of the New York Museum of Modern Art, shocked his associates with his near psychotic flow chart that wildly attempted to explain the order of things.
The video accompanying the show portrays Lombardi speaking authoritatively about his work in a friendly southern accent. At one point the video man asks: "Do you think that anyone is gonna come along and shoot you in the back of the skull tonight?" Smiling, Lombardi answers, "My line on it is there’s nothing on the charts that I can’t substantiate with a major published source." Where Lombardi’s work innovates the discipline of graphic design, it also encourages renewed appreciation of information display as art. Elegant and dazzling, the drawings are an expression of Lombardi’s core practice; research and sketching. Perhaps one day, the Lombardi technique will be taught at university.
